Red
Hat held its second annual
Red
Hat Summit in Nashville this week. At the event,
vnunet.com
sat down with the company's chief executive, Matthew Szulik, to talk about the
firm's latest initiatives and future directions.
This
interview
with Matthew Szulik is available as an audio podcast on the
Silicon
Valley Sleuth blog.
Red Hat will contribute certification and testing tools to Fedora. Is
this signalling an increased development focus within Red Hat?
I wouldn't say increased. I think it's responding to a continued set of needs
that we've been hearing from customers and the open source community. Today you
saw Red Hat responding to that. With the support of the Fedora board, we'll
bring that to market as quickly as we can.
But if you look back at last year's Red Hat Summit, there was a lot
of talk about middleware. Now it seems to be more of a developer focus.
There's the combination of the growing success of Fedora with the pending
Jboss acquisition, and the opportunity for Red Hat to have the infrastructure
and the tools to create a successful developer relationship. Those capabilities
are lining up.
In what way?
They are real, there are not slideware. We've talked about the
Dogtail
project specifically. (You have to love the names that come out of the open
source community.)
Dogtail is a project that was developed internally at Red Hat that's all
around building a test harness for the certification and testing for software
and hardware integration decks. This allows engineers and developers to run
tests against a pre-configured set of solutions that they want to build, and
look for optimisation, regression testing, etc.
It's our hope that the Fedora board will approve that and that it will find
its way into the open source community. In anticipation of the Jboss acquisition
closing, these will provide real tools and real technologies for developers to
use in an open source model.
Is Red Hat looking to compete with companies like Mercury
Interactive?
I think those companies do a good job of what they do and are focusing on.
Their business models are very different from ours. We want to focus on that
core of open source developers who are looking for a different set of
technologies and solutions to build certification and testing around an open
source model.
Do you agree?
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